At the National Association of Biology Teachers (NABT) conference in Minneapolis this year, there was a little card (above) in the goodie participants were given at the registration booth. The card urged anyone posting content related to the conference to add the identifying “hashtag“, #NABT10, to their postings. A hashtag is a short character string, preceded by the # sign, that serves as a marker. A tag. An indentifier, so that others can find your stuff in the vast sea of information known as the world wide web.

For those not able to attend the conference, the hashtag made it easier to tap into the stream of content coming from the conference – photos, blog posts, tweets (from Twitter), Powerpoint slide decks – any of those items posted online that include the hashtag “#NABT10” can be easily found.

Here’s an example. If you go the web site Tweetchat (a Twitter application that makes it easy to search Twitter with a particular hashtag), you can pull up all of the Tweets posted with that hashtag. Here’s a glimpse of those (the real list is much longer and must be scrolled through).

In that list, you’ll find tweets that I posted during Sue Black and Nancy Monson’s excellent “Biology Best Bets” talk – their fourteenth such talk at NABT. Sue and Nancy give their audience the benefit of their combined 40+ years of teaching experience and shared the most incredibly creative ideas for demonstrations, labs and activities. So, even if you weren’t with us in the room, you could get a “feel” for their talk from the tweets. Not only that, I included the link to their handout (the url of which they gave us during the session) in one of the tweets. It’s the next best thing to being there.

Here’s another example. On Saturday morning, Richard Dawkins gave a featured speaker address – a Q/A session, attended by every biology teacher there. The room was packed. Scrolling through the list of tweets, you can see that both Stacy Baker and I were “live tweeting” the session, passing along quotes and summaries from the points that Dawkins was making.

And another. Brad Williamson took photos of all of the 4-year divisions poster session posters on Friday evening and posted them in a Flickr slideshow. Since he added the conference hashtag, that slide show is a breeze to find.

A little hashtag like this….just seven characters long….might sound like a small thing, but it’s a big step forward for the NABT organization. A sign of good things to come as this community steps into the future in order to begin to realize the benefits that social media and online communities can offer to the NABT membership.

What’s next? Livestreaming NABT talks over the internet? Communities of new and experienced teachers, tapping into each other’s strengths in online work groups? The AP Biology community contributing and conversing on this NABT Bio Blog? Professional development webinars? Stay tuned…